Claimed by My Brother’s Best Friend (A Mafia Romance) のすべてのチャプター: チャプター 101 - チャプター 110

VALENTINAThe plane’s tires kissed tarmac and the city’s cold, metallic breath hit me like a reminder. New York smelled of oil and rain and a thousand restless ambitions exactly the kind of place that liked to swallow names and spit out empires. I tucked my collar up against the wind and let the taxi take me to one of my father’s old hideouts a narrow townhouse swallowed by shadow, a place that still wore the family’s quiet arrogance like armor. The Vercettis had not yet claimed it; for now it was mine.I stood in the dim bedroom and let the door close behind me. The room smelled faintly of stale perfume and old money. I moved like a ghost through everything he’d left: a dented chest, a cracked photograph, curtains that didn’t quite meet. In the glass of the dressing table my face leaned back at me sharper now, harder, like something honed until it could cut. I thought of Paris and the stairs where my sister fell, of the blood that had been necessary and the choices that had felt in

DAMIAN“Are you sure you want to go out now?” Luis asks, voice tired at the edges like the cigarette smoke curling between us.I smile, thumb flicking the lighter. The flame paints his face for a second before I bring the cigarette to my lips. Heat and familiar ritual steadies me. “Yeah,” I say. “It’s time.”Luis watches the smoke drift up and settle on the ceiling. “Why?” he asks, and it’s not curiosity it’s the warning of a man who’s seen too many plans end at gunmetal and blood.“Because someone’s after Isabella and our daughter,” I say, and the words taste like iron. I can see, in the small mirror of his pupils, the memory of a night we can’t scrub clean.Luis slams his palm on the table. The ashtray jumps. “Four years ago you barely made it out. If I hadn’t” He gropes for the rest of the sentence and loses it under the weight of what he did. “Thank God I found you when I did. Vincent’s assassin would have killed you.”My laugh is flat. “He shot me that night in Vincent’s hideout

DAMIANThe office smelled like old leather and gun oil. Light from the floor-to-ceiling windows carved the boardroom in hard, bright slices a stage for what was coming. My brother stood under that light like a man daring fate to blink first. Every inch of him screamed insult: the way he held his jaw, the way his eyes tried to make mine small.I could feel the weight of the pistol in my palm like a map to the only place left for him.He laughed, a sharp, nervous sound that didn’t reach his eyes. “Brother,” he said, as if that single word could save him. “Cut it off. You can’t kill me. You love your blood more than anything.”His voice trembled. I let it. I let him smell the fear beneath his own bravado.Four years ago I’d learned how fragile people think themselves. Vincent’s bullet had taught me fragility was a lie people break, they mend, and they come back colder. I had been a ghost in the margins of my own life, and I had watched him take what he thought was his: the crown, the wo

DAMIAN The phone hissed like a distant storm. “Boss, Valentina’s plan is in motion.” Traffic sighed outside the office windows horns, a bus, the city breathing but the man’s voice was a low wire of static and certainty. “We spotted her this morning. A few blocks from the Russo estate. If I’m right, he moves today. Your wife and the girl they’re the targets.” I let the words hang, tasted them like metal. My hand found the edge of the desk and I pressed until the wood bit into my knuckles, keeping the impulse from showing. “Vincent?” I asked, each syllable a small, deliberate steel cut. I didn’t need to ask why; Valentina never acted without a shadow covering her back. “He left New York this morning,” the man said. “Ma’am Isabella and the little one are alone. Only the guards with them.” A smirk came without permission, slow and automatic, like a predator finally smelling blood. I could see my reflection in the glass now an outline against the city, shoulders steady, eyes cold.

VINCENTThe phone left a white-hot print in my palm. I didn’t shout so much as the words ripped out of me.“What do you mean?” I could feel the plane tilting under me, the cabin’s hum swallowed by the call. For a breath I listened to the other end ragged, frantic voices then the single line that made the world drop: Isabella. Kidnapped. By Valentina.The meeting in Toronto dissolved into a smear of faces and the clack of keyboards words that meant nothing now. I ended it with a single, clean cut: a sentence, the quiet click of a laptop closing. “Tell the men to prepare themselves,” I told the assistant riding in the cabin, but my voice felt like it belonged to someone else; the paper cup on the tray trembled as if it knew the truth my words refused to hold.I called the man on the other end again. The line crackled, and then his voice came through, small and hurried. “Where is she?” The question left my mouth before the air could steady.“Boss… we couldn’t find her. We found the bodi